I have been watching this thread and you are triple downing on a point that you have no real experience with. Competitive e-sports is a real thing. There are e-sports arenas. (How are people even arguing this on HN?)
The International (a DOTA 2 competition) has like $40m in prizes. EWC in 2025 was $70m. 99.6 million people watched the League of Legends World Championship final. And we're not even talking about the millions of dollars of sponsorship involved.
That's great your mom isn't competitive in Valorant, but massively irrelevant. It's like me saying "I play flag football with friends, there is no competitive football."
Anti-cheat is important because this is how the best players are discovered, this is how they're recruited. If a game is 50%+ cheaters, the game will die... DOTA2 would cease to exist today as a big deal. Same with Valorant.
Aside from competitive gaming, GTA V online makes $1 BILLION in ARR. That would be $0 if the game was flooded with cheaters.
Now this isn't me defending kernel level anti-cheat, I think there are better ways to do it and some games do a great job here.
But man, calling GTA V online and competitive e-sports a "tiny bubble" is like calling the NFL a "tiny bubble".
I didn't say there's no competitive e-sports; I said basically no players are part of it, and that's true. The amount of money around a tournament is irrelevant to the fact that 99.99% of players do not participate in such tournaments.
Millions of people play American football casually vs a couple thousand in the NFL, and football isn't a very popular sport to actually play. We don't need to drug test everyone at the park. We don't need to require everyone to play with official league equipment. Again, >99.9% of football players are not in the NFL. The NFL is a tiny bubble in the world of people who play football.
And it's trivial for e-sports tournament organizations with millions of dollars in prizes to spend $50k on a set of standard, controlled computers to play on. Cheating shouldn't be a problem when money is on the line because the only time a player touches the machine is at the tournament. You use standard league equipment during league games. Otherwise who cares?
As far as I know, GTA V does have cheaters and has since the beginning, so it's apparently an example of how it doesn't matter.
Even so, no game ever is 50% cheaters, or anywhere near that. Even games like Gunz: The Duel where the netcode was so garbage that hits were decided on the computer of the person being shot still didn't have many cheaters. Probably less than 1% of players. The overwhelming majority are just having fun. Cheats are boring after like 5 minutes.
The International (a DOTA 2 competition) has like $40m in prizes. EWC in 2025 was $70m. 99.6 million people watched the League of Legends World Championship final. And we're not even talking about the millions of dollars of sponsorship involved.
That's great your mom isn't competitive in Valorant, but massively irrelevant. It's like me saying "I play flag football with friends, there is no competitive football."
Anti-cheat is important because this is how the best players are discovered, this is how they're recruited. If a game is 50%+ cheaters, the game will die... DOTA2 would cease to exist today as a big deal. Same with Valorant.
Aside from competitive gaming, GTA V online makes $1 BILLION in ARR. That would be $0 if the game was flooded with cheaters.
Now this isn't me defending kernel level anti-cheat, I think there are better ways to do it and some games do a great job here.
But man, calling GTA V online and competitive e-sports a "tiny bubble" is like calling the NFL a "tiny bubble".